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The test-tampering case went from gotcha to whodunit to this: Did it ever really
happen?

Stacey Carna was principal of Ashville Elementary when the school secretaries, six teachers and
custodians told officials in the Pickaway County district that they had caught her changing test
scores in 2006-07.

The district alerted the state. The tests were marked invalid. The state investigated, then told
Carna that it planned to suspend her educator licenses.

Carna, 39, was sent home with her $81,585 pay for more than a year -- until her contract ran out
-- because district officials were sure they'd nabbed her.

But after five days of administrative hearings this summer, featuring 19 witnesses,
security-camera video clips, charts, photos and mountains of other evidence, a hearing officer says
the state couldn't prove that Carna did anything wrong.

In fact, hearing officer Elizabeth L. Schuster said no one proved that tampering with the
children's tests had taken place.

Schuster, an attorney paid by the Ohio Department of Education to try educator-discipline cases,
recommended no punishment for Carna; the State Board of Education will vote Tuesday.

More often than not, the board accepts hearing officers' recommendations.

On the last day of her hearing in August, Carna testified tearfully. "My credibility has been
questioned; my honesty and integrity have been questioned. My professional name has been ruined. In
a competitive job force, who in this room would hire me for a job?" she said.

Carna would not comment for this story.

One of her lawyers, Larry Heyman, said the former principal doesn't have a new job as an
educator. He said Carna spent a fair amount of money defending herself against a "haphazard"
investigation by her former district.

If the hearing officer had believed that Carna had tried to boost students' test scores, her
suspension would have been for only one year, per state law. But she wasn't willing to accept
punishment for something she didn't do, Heyman said.

"For Stacey, it was much more about a license and a piece of paper," he said. "It was about her
integrity."

The proof, they said, was solid: During testing week, Carna had stayed uncharacteristically late
in her office with the door closed. Students' tests appeared to have been mixed up in a filing area
that usually is orderly. And teachers said they thought they had seen a suspicious number of
erasure marks on students' test booklets.

After testing was over one day, the amateur detectives hatched a scheme to catch the cheater.
They placed the box containing the fifth-grade tests exactly 3 inches from the storage-room filing
cabinets. The fourth-grade tests were 4 inches from the cabinets, and those for third-graders were
2 inches away. The secretaries said they locked the door behind them.

The next morning, the crates of tests had been pushed flush with the cabinets. The Teays Valley
school district suspended Carna, despite her assertions of innocence.

No students were asked if they had erased answers on their tests. The tests were never scored.
In testimony, the secretaries said they had done some erasing in students' answer booklets to make
the bubble-sheets neat.

When the first tests were discarded, students were retested. They did well.